Dümling, Albrecht, "Eisler's Music for
Resnais'
Night and Fog
(1955): A Musical Counterpoint to the Cinematic Portrayal of
Terror," in
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
(Abingdon), vol. 18, no. 4, October 1998.

* * *

Two closely related problems: How does one make a film about the
concentration camps? and how does one write a reference book entry about a
film about the concentration camps? The facts are too appalling to be
aesthetically encompassed; any
attempt
to encompass them seems almost beyond criticism. The word that rises
automatically to one's lips to describe what was done in the camps
is "inhuman"; yet it was human beings who performed those
acts. For both the film-maker and the critic, it is one's own
"humanity" that is in question.

In making
Night and Fog
director Alain Resnais and his writer Cayrol confronted a problem that is
simultaneously aesthetic and moral: how does one adequately represent the
enormity of the camps without so overwhelming the spectator that the only
possible response

Nuit et brouillard

is a despairing impotence?—how to achieve and sustain a
contemplative distance without softening or trivializing the material?
Their solution, curiously
seductive
(and the strangeness of that word in such a context is deliberate), is
ultimately unsatisfying. The failure lies in the fact that the kind of
distance achieved is aesthetic rather than analytical; we find ourselves
invited to contemplate, not the historical/material realities, but an
art-object.

The film is built on a systematic pattern of related oppositions:
present/past, colour/black-and-white, tranquility/horror, natural
environment/buildings, footage shot for the film/archive material.
Particularly stressed is the recurrent Resnais theme: importance of
memory/difficulty of remembering. Nothing can mitigate the appalling
impact of the newsreel material incorporated in the film, with the horrors
carefully built up to, yet introduced almost casually, so that we at once
expect them and are taken unawares. The problem arises from the attitude
to the horror that the film, overall, constructs.

One omission—startling today, though no one seems to have commented
on it at the time—is symptomatic in more than one way of the
film's failure. One sequence carefully specifies the various
coloured triangles that identified different groups of victims,
distinguishing the Jews from other ethnic groups, political prisoners,
etc. Presumably Resnais and Cayrol had very thorough documentation at
their disposal, yet no reference is made to the
pink
triangle: the filmmakers surround the deaths of the (approximately)
300,000 homosexuals who died in the camps with their own "night and
fog" of silence. A sinister enough comment on the
"liberal" conscience in itself, this omission has
implications that lead much further. The fact that the Nazis attempted to
exterminate gays as well as Jews points to certain fundamental traits of
Fascism that our culture generally prefers to gloss over for its own
comfort. Alongside the demand for racial purity went the insistence on
extreme sexual division: "masculinity" and
"femininity" must be strictly differentiated, women
relegated to the subordinate position of the mothers who would produce
future generations of "pure" aryans. The reason why
patriarchal capitalist society is so reluctant to confront this aspect of
Nazism is clearly that it has its own stake in the same assumptions.

The problem, however, is not simply that Resnais and Cayrol cannot make
that analysis (though it is a fundamental one); they really offer no
analysis at all (with the result that they tend to repress the possibility
of really understanding the camps). The final moments of the film are
extremely moving: at the post-war trials, we are led through the whole
hierarchy of camp authority; everyone denies
responsibility; we are left with the question, "Then who is
responsible?" Yet the implication is something like: "These
things have always happened; they have happened again; they will always
happen." Denied concrete material/historical analysis, we are
thrown back on "the human condition." The answer the film
(without much hope) proposes is eternal vigilance. Yet no
"liberal" vigilance is going to prevent the recurrence of
the camps (or related phenomena) until the fundamental premises and
structures of our culture are radically transformed.

This account of
Night and Fog
is perhaps ungenerous, the problems inherent in the undertaking being so
daunting. The film is intensely moving. Yet to confront the human
monstrousness of the camps demands the utmost rigour from both the
film-maker and the critic. Ultimately, the kind of
"distance" constructed by Resnais and Cayrol seems less
honourable, as a response, than the direct emotional assault of work like
Schönberg's "A Survivor from Warsaw."

—Robin Wood

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